The invention relates to evaluation and calibration of communications systems and more particularly bit-error testing devices for evaluation and calibration of communication systems.
An issue that has been problematic in communications countermeasures as well as telecommunication test, evaluation and calibration has been the lack of a generic bit-error testing device. Such a device would compare two digital signals over a wide range of data rates and count the number of bit errors that occur between the two signals under the conditions of noise and jamming.
Though there are many bit error testers on the market, all are tailored towards a particular set of frequencies or waveforms. For example, a known prior art bit error tester has a range of 50 Mb/s to 3.6 Gb/s, connections of GPIB, LAN, and Parallel printer port, sub-42 ps risetimes and a mouse and keyboard and costs tens of thousand of dollars. This prior art tester cannot test in the range of a few Mb/s or less. Most prior art bit error testers on the market have a range between 50-100 Mb/s and 3-5 Gb/s. By contrast, the present invention can test in the range of a few Mb/S or less. Additionally, the present invention much more economic, with the cost of the invention coming in below a couple thousand dollars.
A second known prior art bit error tester capable of smaller ranges has a RS-232 connection, LAN connection (Ethernet), and a color touch screen as its outputs. The range, although smaller, is still between 1 MHz and 110 MHz. By contrast, the present invention has a range from 100 Hz up to around 20 MHz, which is well below most if not all testers on the market. The cost of the second known prior art bit error tester is also well above the cost of the present invention.
Further, in both prior art testing units, the unit under test (UUT) is sent a signal from the bit error testers and the output of the unit is sent back into the bit error testers. However, the present invention does not send any signal; one can send any kind of signal into the present invention and the unit under test can manually line up the sent and received signals with one another. The invention does not do anything extra, nor does it have a monitor to look at the waveforms. Its simplicity makes it strictly a BERT instead of a multipurpose tool, which saves on size and on cost.